Everyone once in a while here on Unwritten Histories, we like to show you how historians develop and design historical research projects. Today we have a special guest post by Peter Anderson previewing a new collaborative project with on the history of Canadian soil scientists and their work. Pete is one of the nicest historians that I know, and a big help on my blog post on lilacs, so I’m really excited to be able to share his research with you! Enjoy!
Photo by Will Knight
Peter Anderson is a historical geographer and science. He runs History Applied, a historical research consultancy in Ottawa, Ontario. His personal research examines the confluence of the agricultural sciences, politics, and landscape change in Canada and his doctoral thesis explored the early history of Canada’s Central Experimental Farm from the 1880s through the 1930s. He is a member of the Coalition to Protect the Central Experimental Farm and can be found on Twitter @dairpo.
“Soil is an incredibly thin surface layer of the earth’s crust—the rocks and their fragments that have been weathered down to sand and clay-sized particles that hold moisture, nutrients and organic matter…This is our agricultural soil resource and our heritage.” D.R. Coote and J. Dumanski, “The State of Our Agricultural Soil Resource” Draft Paper, 1985. Neatby Building, Room B89, Shelf 18, Box 4-27.
This blog post is an early preview of a collaborative project with William Knight (Ingenium Canada), Kirsten Greer (University of Nipissing), Dave Howlett, and Xiaoyaun Geng (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) exploring the history of soil science in Canada. Launched this past June, this research project hopes to tell the story of Canadian soil scientists and their research program as well as to document and preserve their documentary and artefactual heritage. This phase of the project is generously funded by the Canadian Soil Information Service at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Horizons
From the permafrost cryosols in the north to the productive loams in the south, the soils of Canada are the product of long processes of development and change between the bedrock beneath and organic matter above. Initially linked to concepts of agricultural fertility and potential, since the first decades of the twentieth century Canadian scientists have applied a variety of methods to understand and chart the soils of Canada stemming from the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and field husbandry (1).
Soil Monoliths overlooking my workstation in the CanSIS offices.
Soil science in Canada did not develop in isolation. Rather, knowledge of Canadians soils was produced through continuous interaction between universities, provinces, and the federal government, as well as with international partners. The overlap of constitutional jurisdictions relating to agriculture, for example, resulted in many projects being funded, at least in part, by the federal government, especially after the establishment of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in 1935, but carried out by scientists based in the provincial agriculture departments and agricultural colleges (2).
Many of the early scientists were trained in the United States and worked closely with their American counterparts during surveys along border regions. For example, in the 1920s, Manitoba Agricultural College professor J.H. Ellis (who pursued his graduate studies at the University of Minnesota) conducted a soil survey of the Red River region near the border with the United States. Here he came into contact and engaged in correspondence with Constantin Nikiforoff, a Russian soil scientist and refugee from the revolution who made his away to the United States in 1921 (3). This connection was fortuitous and, alongside a field trip to Western Canada by Russia’s K.D. Glinka and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Curtis Marbut (who translated Glinka’s work into English) after the 1927 First International Congress of Soil Science, held in Washington, D.C., helped spread Russian soil science expertise to Canada. Ellis would later write a report recommending the adoption of a modified Nikiforoff method of soil survey to his counterparts across Canada. According to Ellis, this system was not only “simple, effective and satisfactory” but would help “unify the survey projects … and faciliat[e] the correlation of soils throughout the Dominion.” (4)
Ellis’s adaptation of the Nikiforoff method, presented in 1932.
As noted above, federal coordination of soil science practices had its roots in the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. Initially housed within the Experimental Farm Service under the direction of E.S. Archibald, parts of the PFRA’s budget was made available to provincial researchers to undertake soil survey work. Building on this spirit of collaboration, the National Soil Survey Committee was formed in 1940, although it didn’t meet until after the end of the European portion of the Second World War in 1945. The Central Experimental Farm’s Peter C. Stobbe and A. Leahey spearheaded this committee and worked closely with figures such as Ellis to put forward a standardized system of soil classification in Canada (5).
Later, high modernist projects, such as the Canada Land Inventory (launched in 1963) undertaken under the auspices of the 1961 federal Agriculture Rehabilitation and Development Act, highlighted the role of centralized soil knowledge in shaping expectations about what the best possible uses of land could be (6). Initially focused on agricultural concerns, the CLI expanded to other land (and water!) uses from agriculture to forestry, recreation, hunting, and sports fishing. At the same time, the overwhelming scale geographic data accumulated about Canada’s land base through soil surveys and the CLI began to test the physical and conceptual limits of traditional cartographic practices. Simply put: more geographic data was being produced than could be expressed using manual mapping techniques. This lead directly to the formulation and creation of the Canadian geographic information system—a precursor to modern GIS software—as well as a suite of hardware, standardized field note forms, and survey techniques (7). (An early digitization table acts as my makeshift workstation in AAFC’s warehouse.)
While the CLI, and its land capability classification scheme, still influences decision makers today, the work of soil scientists has continued to change to meet new challenges. Writing as he approached retirement in 1995, federal scientist Alex McKeague argued that a firm understanding of soil with an eye to its preservation requires a “healthy national soil survey organization.” (8) Although over the course of his long career he had seen soil science’s place amongst the agricultural sciences and within the civil service ebb and flow, he remained confident that his colleagues and successors would persevere in order to meet to the changing political and environmental needs of the future. (9)
Workspace using historic CGIS hardware in the CanSIS warehouse.
Excavations
This brief historical narrative provides the backdrop for my work this summer. My task is to begin excavating the documentary and material culture of late twentieth century soil science while placing it in its wider temporal and international contexts. As a historical research consultant for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Canadian Soil Information Service (CanSIS),and in partnership with the Canada Agriculture and Food Museumand Nipissing University’s Centre for Understanding Semi-Peripheries, I have three main deliverables:
First, I am creating an inventory of material stored at the Central Experimental Farm, including the papers of retired scientists, old maps (including a 1945 pencil crayon coloured soil map of the Farm by Peter Stobbe), scientific instruments, assorted publications (including those I relied upon to draft the historical narrative), soil monoliths, and thousands of slides dating as far back as the 1940s. This work is already well underway, and the buildings at the Farm are a treasure trove for historical geographers of the agricultural sciences as new finds are always possible.
Next, I will conduct a series of oral history interviews with retired scientists, potentially including those whose papers I catalogued during the first phase. The goal of these interviews is to explore the goals, assumptions, and evolution of soil science over the last fifty years. Both the interviews and their transcripts will be digitized and made available for future researchers.
Finally, I will be producing a number of public history deliverables describing both the research process (such as this post) and its findings. Building on the materials described in the first phase and the interviews undertaken in the second, my goal is to tell rich historical geographic stories using prose, HGIS, and other online tools. In addition, important documents will be scanned and put online alongside transcripts of our interviews.
Peter Stobbe’s 1945 hand coloured soil map of the Central Experimental Farm, to be scanned this summer. The Neatby Building is located at the top-centre of the map.
Partnerships
Just as Canadian soil science has been a collaborative effort, so too is my excavation of its history. This project was undertaken in partnership with public historians (William Knight and Cristina Woods), historical geographers (Kirsten Greer and yours truly), and soil scientists (Dave Howlett and Xiaoyuan Geng). Each group brings their own expertise, interests, and funding opportunities to the project. Our common goals include developing a historical narrative of Canadian soil science for public and academic audiences, including through blog posts such as this one.
Slide depicting Canada-US collaboration on the Ontario-Michigan correlation soil survey, 1950s.
My hope is that the work undertaken this summer will serve as a proof of concept for interaction between experts in the arts, social sciences, and agricultural (including soil) sciences. Our goal is to continue the project beyond our current funding horizon and to dig deeper into the history of soil science in Canada by examining the interaction between federal and provincial scientists, the influence of international expertise, and the enlistment of expert knowledge in shifting political goals from agricultural settlement to environmental sustainability.
Notes
(1) J.H. Ellis, “History and Development of the Soils Department in the Faculty of Agriculture at M.A.C. and the Univeristy of Manitoba, 1906-1955,” Unpublished report (Winnipeg: 1955).
(2) P.C. Stobbe and J.A. McKeague, History of Soil Survey in Canada, 1914-1975Historical Series No. 11 (Ottawa: Department of Agriculture: 1978): 6-15.
(3) Stobbe and McKeague, 10; “C.C. Nikiforoff, 92, Retired Scientist with USDA,” Washington Post14 April 1979, available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1979/04/14/c-c-nikiforoff-92-retired-soil-scientist-with-usda/5ba822c0-a72a-43c7-b97f-cc123f499a0b/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.00aaa2fc901d
(4) J.H. Ellis, “A Field Classification of Soils for use in the Soil Survey,” Scientific Agriculture12.6 (1932): 338-345.
(5) J.A. McKeague, “Soil survey and genesis and classification research in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Soil Science, 75 (1995): 3-9.
(6) Shannon Studen-Bower, “Toos for Rational Development: The Canada Land Inventory and the Canada Geographic Information System in Mid-twentieth century Canada,” Scientia Canadensis40.1 (2018): 44-75.
(7) “ARDA: The Canada Land Inventory: Objectives, Scope and Organization” Report No 1 (Ottawa: Department of Forestry, 1965).
(8) J.A. McKeague, “Soil survey and genesis and classification research in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Soil Science, 75 (1995): 3-9.
(9) See for example: D.F. Acton and L.J. Gregorich (editors), The Health of Our Soils: Toward sustainable agriculture in Canada Publication 1906/E (Ottawa: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 1995); “The Importance of Soils,” Video (Ottawa: Agriculture Canada, 2015). Online: http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/news/scientific-achievements-in-agriculture/agro-ecosystem-productivity-and-health/the-importance-of-soils/?id=1429280876604
Thanks Pete! I’m really glad to see collaboration between the humanities and the science, since I think we have much in common and much to gain from working together. I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post. If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian history roundup! See you then!
Leave a Reply